A Boy Must Learn, Part Three

I have (en Twittre, and elsewhere) received a healthy volume of requests for various retail excursions into the Eyrewood. We created Lookouts and Automata expressly to be investigated, it is their purpose to be explored, and from the very first a broad array of suitors presented themselves. Not every suitor was worthy, and most were turned away. As the father of a girl - a kind of larval woman, I’m told - I saw this as an invaluable learning opportunity. Summing up, though, it’s simply a matter of finding someone who loves it as much as you do. Having been seared in previous ill-starred alliances, it’s the sort of thing we’d rather get right.

I find myself waiting with bated breath for each chapter of Arena.net’s ongoing manifesto. I mentioned as much, casually, in a dashed-off chirp while I was doing something else, and received a response to the effect that it was “too late” and that they’d “never beat WoW.” Preparing my response, I shifted my feet to leverage the water-slicing stroke of the suio-ryu school. It was very mean, as I can be sometimes, but what I felt wasn’t anger - it was something akin to nausea. In the end, I couldn’t respond with my blade.

As an aesthetic vision, “defeating World of Warcraft commercially” basically fucking sucks. It’s everything that is wrong with everything, and the looking glass moment here is that this didn’t come from Bobby Kotick or some tertiary corporate marketing organ, swollen with tar - it came from the community. We get infected with this horse race bullshit, and then we wonder why we end up with a truncation of this medium’s Goddamned potential.